Digital Jumpstart Workshops 2011

Thursday & Friday, March 3-4, 2011

455 Watson Library

These four sessions aim to provide faculty, staff, and graduate students with hands-on introductions to digital tools and practices in order to help you capture and digitize your data, discover and analyze patterns in text, and present and disseminate your results. In addition, an opening keynote talk will provide a general introduction to digital humanities. Participants may choose any or all of the sessions below. All skill levels, from beginner to seasoned digital humanist, are welcome. Participants should bring their own laptops and, if available, data.

Welcome and Keynote: What is the Digital Humanities?

Session 1: Getting Started in the Digital Humanities

Session 2: Capture and Digitization: Text, Audio, Images

Session 3: Text Mining

Session 4: Visualization Tools for Beginners

Schedule

Thursday, March 3

9:00 – 9:15 a.m. | Welcome

9:15 a.m.-10:15 a.m. | Opening and Keynote talk: What is the Digital Humanities?

Speaker: Katherine L. Walter, Co-Director, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Speaker: Katherine L. Walter, Co-Director, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

This introductory session will cover a range of topics to consider when planning and launching digital humanities projects, such as: what are the digital humanities; ranges and examples of digital humanities projects; copyright issues; use of metdata standards; resources for getting started; and funding opportunities.

This session covers techniques to get three kinds of data into digital form: text (via scanning, optical character recognition, and text structuring), audio (via analogue capture and digital transfer), and images (via scanning). Having data in these formats is the prerequisite for analysis, including text mining and visualization.

Data mining allows the discovery of patterns in textual, image, and other data types. It is a powerful tool that can enable humanists to extend their research by covering much more data than could ever be read or analyzed by hand. This introductory hands-on session we will focus on basic data mining techniques and software that can help find patterns in your or other people’s data.

This hands-on session introduces powerful and flexible visualization tools available for free or at low cost on the web, with an emphasis on general applications in research and teaching in the humanities. No previous experience required.